Difference Between Using Shared Hosting And Reseller Hosting?

Aug 17, 2008

Here is my dilemma, thanks to a thread in these forums I was directed to a hosting website called pc-core.net and I was interested in using them, because it does not appear that they oversell at all. My question is regarding the fact that they have the shared hosting for $12/month with ~5gb of disk space and 50gb of transfer. I then just looked at reseller hosting for the heck of it, and noticed i could get a reseller hosting account with 45gb storage and 450gb of bandwidth for $10/month. Even though I wont be selling hosting, or anything like that, can I use a reseller hosting account like a normal shared hosting account?...just with more space and bandwidth?

I'm new to the VPS scene, so could someone tell me the difference between VPS and say shared hosting or dedicated hosting? Actually I really like to know what a Virtual Private Server actually is.. I know shared hosting is typically a single account on a server with several hundred other accounts which is used primarily for the sole purpose of hosting websites, and I know that dedicated hosting is functionally the same as colo except that you rent the server, instead of having your own purchased server plugged into some network. So what is VPS?

This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.

----------------------------------------------------------------------Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?

Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.

So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:

1. Who will be managing these sites?

2. How important is site security between sites?

3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?

4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?

In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.

1. Who will be managing these site?

If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.

When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.

2. How important is site security between sites?

This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.

If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.

Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.

The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.

3. Will these domains need SSLs?

As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.

Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.

Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.

4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?

We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?

It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.

If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.

But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.

If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.

The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have.----------------------------------------------------------------------

Please help the host's tutorial didn't give me much. Icalled support & they want to charge us to ask for support since it is a un-managed vps. I did manage to update the NS and add the hostname...so I think there are only a few more simple steps. BUT I can't believe the file manager is not there or email set-up.

I have a few projects of making websites for some clients. I want to buy some hosting space, should i buy shared or resellers accounts? When they say one can host unlimited domains on a shared hosting space does it mean one can also use it for different clients. As of now i am not interested in just selling domain names and hosting spaces to clients. I need space only to host the website i design for my clients.

why reseller accounts are considered better than shared hosting accounts?

Both are the same, except that reseller manages each domain separately. Shared hosting is way much cheaper than a reseller, are there really big negatives which make them much cheaper?

If SEO and Adsense wise, there is a difference between shared and reseller, due to separate domain management in the reseller being favourable for SEO, I would go with reseller.

So far, I've done shared hosting, and using htaccess, had no problems setting up multiple sites in my shared account, which is a lot cheaper than any reseller account. Not sure how the search engines would treat my multiple sites....

Are addon domains (in a shared hosting) - bad, since Cpanel actually treats them as subdomains?

how come the difference between shared and resellers storage is so different? If you buy shared, you can get stupid amounts of storage like 250 gigs or even unlimited for $5 a month. Yet the same company sells a reseller account for $30 and you only get 20 gigs.

Assuming you are going to split that up and sell that 20 gigs in 1 gig blocks to try and make money, why wouldn't your potential customer buy the shared account instead, and get way more space? It seems backwards to me. Shared $5 should be 20 gigs, and resellers $30 should be 250 gigs. I'm talking about big name trusted sites, not fly-by-nights who have unlimited everything.

The more I read on the forum, the more I'm beginning to consider a reseller plan.

Basically, I'm an ASP.NET/MS-SQL developer and I foresee myself developing (and possibly managing) a relatively small number of websites for people who likely have neither the technical skills nor desire to get too involved with maintaining their websites. So, I need to be able to host multiple domains, have multiple databases, and probably multiple FTP accounts.

The obvious advantage of reseller accounts, as I understand them, is that they give you the ability to provide the website owner (my customer) the tools to manage their site in more or less the same way they could if they directly set up their hosting account with GoDaddy or whomever. But, if my customers end up being people that don't want to mess with any of that, then this capability is not important. However, after looking at ResellerZoom.com, which I saw recommended in another thread, it seems the sheer capacity of resources available, e.g. unlimited databases, 200 domains, make it worth the slightly higher cost.

I currently have Reseller Hosting with Clook UK costing me £21.14 per month but I have noticed several providers now have VPS packages available for only £17.99 per month. The VPS packages are able to offer more storage space and higher bandwidth for less money.

I'm considering making the move to a Linux VPS service but need to know if the learning curve is steep in comparison to the CPanel/WHM environment I am used to?

I'll be looking to move 3 sites which all include forums onto this new service.

Can anyone recommend a good but fairly cheap host? All servers must be UK based.

I know to some of you this may sound like a totally silly question. But I would like to know what the main advantages are if you have a VPS instead of a shared reseller hosting.

I notice some of the basic VPS packages give you 512MB of memory. Other than that, the rest of the stats seem to be along the lines of what you might get in an advanced reseller hosting plan such as one available from Reseller Zoom.

I am looking into VPS as a dedicated server is a little over my budget, however, I am not entirely clear what makes VPS better.

an recommendation on a shared hosting reseller with unlimited bandwidth(or atleast about 1500gb) and about 60-70gb harddrive? And preferably have servers in the US and europe, so i can pick one in usa and 1 in europe.

I'm trying to find at least three web hosting companies to choose from to host a Joomla websites on a shared server. Would consider dedicated if the deal was right. I have a friend of mine who wants to create a church website, and is looking for the best deal. I use Netfirms which I have never had an issue with, but I didn't want to be bias, and would like give him other options to choose from.

Is there a good WebHosting Review site, I could check out, or maybe someone could recommend their top three. I reading threw the forums here and I noticed there are not that many complaints with Hostgator. Again, I just want to see if there was anything out there better.

I'have a problem with my aps setup on sanbox.When i create on customer ccp when i click finish i have this error. I must only test.

Error: Instance of application with id 124 and version '1-4' can not be provided: There is no resource of class 'Shared hosting Apache' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1.:There is no resource of class 'Physical hosting (IIS)' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1..If i add the shared hosting apache resourse i get this error : There are no "apache" services that satisfy given attributes: "Web Cluster".

I am developing a website for a client of mine (the client is a close friend and know's that he is getting a newbie). This site will be larger (project wise) than anything that I have ever done (everything I have done in the past has been FrontPage). We will be using several third party applications that need to run on the server as well as our own custom developed applications. We do not yet know how much access to the server's deeper structures we will need for all of the applications that we want loaded on our server to run. Things we have in mind: oscommerce, mysql, php5, apache, linux, vbulletin, blogger, phpbb, adserver, ect... Would these things run ok on a shared host and would I have full authority to configure them without needing full access to the server? Or will I need access to the entire server (dedicated server) in order to have full customization capabilities? I guess all I am trying to figure out at this point is will shared hosting for a large project limit our abilities to use 3rd party apps, or do most 3rd party application designers build their stuff to work in a shared hosting environment anyway? If we need to get a dedicated server we will, but if we can get away with shared hosting for a while (especially during development when the site will not be generating revenue) it would be nice to avoid the price of a dedicated server. Many thanks for your comments, insight, and expertise! Also, if anyone can sight some common scenarios that may require a dedicated server over a shared hosting plan, that may help me to understand what the limitations of a shared hosting plan vs. a deicated or virtual dedicated server are.

Do website builders generally go with shared hosting or dedicated server? I mean, if they work on several websites would they get a dedicated server instead of shared? From what I understand through reading shared hosting is basically if you only have one website. So one with multiple websites would go with a dedicated server?

Prospective web hosting clients have to understand that there's a clear difference between a cheap hosting service and an affordable one.

For one, an afordable service has to do with the budget of the client, meaning the cient has a an amount he will like to spend on a web host account while a cheap web hosting service has to do with the price of the product in relation with the services offered. For example a shared host that you get for $10 will definitey have more features than a shared that cost $3.99.

You have to know what you want before taking an action that you may regret later.

if the physical location of the hosting company's server makes any difference to search engine rankings (especially Google)?

The reason I ask is that I have been running a successful site, targeted at potential customers in the USA. About a year ago, I moved to a different hosting company, which happened to be in Canada. At that point, my traffic dropped by about 50%.

I'm now thinking of moving the site back to a US-based host, but, before I do, I'd welcome your opinions on whether this would be worthwhile.

How long do you wait before moving from shared to VPS or dedicated? Apart from security and speed, what are the benefits of dedicated hosting? This says [url] that shared is better than dedicated because you have to do less..

I use shared web hosting service to get my website online. I'm wondering how many people use dedicated servers or virtual private servers instead and pay from $20 to several hundreds of dollars? Will I face any big problem with shared web hosting package which makes me choose dedicated servers?